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An Essay on Information Overload \ Esej o nadmiarze informacji

intense Communications activities on the internet have justified reasons to complain on the information overflow that hampers their time management schemes, and on informa-tion pollution and chaos that make the digital universe unfriendly and even hostile. We ean see how information providers in order to push information toward us, try to urge us to absorb it, are eompeting to attract our attention that, incidentaily, has become one of the most precious commodities and currencies on the marketplace. Those who claim or believe that in this case, as it often happens to other goods eontending on the market, morę providers and competition give rise to a better offer and ąuality are wretchedly wrong; it is just the opposite, the inflation of information providers and consequently information itself causes and promotes by and large inferior information products and worse infor-mation-based services. We witness here an equivalent of Copernicus-Gresham law saying that poor information drives out good one. Yet let us immediately add that the providers of information are not the only side to blame; part of the guilt goes also to the receivers of information. This assertion will be reiterated later on.

Quite common is the analogy that compares information overload with excessive con-sumption of food and obesity. The reaction to the immoderate food consumpLion, especially offered by fast food services and discount shops is the growing movement of slow food and the emphasis on appreciating and promoting a healthy lifestyle and quality rather than quantity. Although regulating and controlling the world of information is much morę diflicult than the realm of food, undoubtedly the times has come to systematically and scientifically tackle also the problem of information overload and to work out Solutions for scientists and researchers as well as for ordinary information consumers, and to widely and aggressively champion and promote these Solutions, lhis paper attempts to contribute to this process by drawing attention to the fact that the information flood is commonplace regardless of the category of information consumers. But at the same time, only rare are the cases of devising and putting into practice countermeasures to control the information flow and intake and to become conscious users of information. The paper claims that although most media and ICT may cause information overconsumption, it is still possible to avoid the trap of information overload through a sensible administration of information diet and establishing information filters. We propose a set of hints to apply for protecting oneself against the information flood. Also, sińce the discipline of information science has not yet provided information users with comprehensive methodologies to help control information intake and resist against the information pollution, we try to fili out this gap, though to a certain degree only, and provide some draft recommendations to information science regarding this issue, mainly based on boosting digital literacy. The paper is structured as follows: in the next chapter information flood generators will be identified and briefly characterised, then the possible measures against the information overcharge will be proposed, and eventually a few finał remarks will be added at the end of the paper.

2. Information flood generators

In 1964 Bertram M. Gross in his book The Managing of Organisations and later in 1970 Alvin To filer in his seminal book Futurę Shockwere probably the first researchers who used the term information overload. In (Speier at al., 1999,338) this notion was defined as follows: